Well, recently the old Spondoolas have been running painfully low. So instead of "Budgetting" for various "non-essentials" (bah, who makes up these crazy notions) I've found nifty work arounds. Take my gaming for example. Instead of spending £40 on that nice shiny copy of Halo3, which I'm bound to get bored of; I've signed up to that much publicised Metaboli service. So far things are going well, and it's made me really quite grateful for this kind of service.

So far I've had a generally good experience, as expected there are alot of sub-par games on the service but seeing as I have unlimited access as long as I keep up my monthly fee I have no need to want to approach these games developers with a hand grenade and a pin between my teeth.

Many games that I'd played over a mates house or simply been to lazy to buy I've enjoyed on this service. I hadn't even played F.E.A.R until last week. Woah what a game. I digress, the point I wish to make is that a few games on their service I'd wanted to try and was almost willing to buy, however after trying them I'm oh so glad I didn't shell out the big bucks.

As for the economics, I used to play WoW, now thats £8 a month, for one game. On Metaboli I am paying £12 a month for access to ~190 games. I may not spend as much time on each as I did on WoW and they may not all be up to the same standard but frankly thats a good thing. Wow is a game that is the crystal meth of the gaming world. Everyone knows about it, alot of people do it, but it's going to take a huge number of deaths for someone to notice what a poison it is :P (I curse you Blizzard for making me unfit.) I'll give a quick example of the economics of my experience so far.

Games played on Metaboli so far: 22 (Now alot of those have been a case of the game downloading, me going on it for twenty minutes, screaming as the blood rushes from my eyes and then quickly deleting said title, but at least I'm trying new things!)

Subscribed to service for: 1 month

Ergo: 12/22= 0.55 Oh sweet baby jesus, yes thats right. I have been spending an average of 55 pence per game.

I will continue to note my experience with the service, and with games such as Rainbox Six:Vegas, Supreme Commander and Civilization IV coming to the service things are looking up for metaboli.